


notes on the many different kinds of monsters, and the knights who fight them off

by milominderbinder



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: 3am Coffee, Comforting Mickey, M/M, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2018-01-18 01:09:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1409419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milominderbinder/pseuds/milominderbinder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Mickey goes down to the Gallagher kitchen in the middle of the night, he finds Liam, scared and hiding from another nightmare. And he comforts him, because Mickey knows what being scared is like.</p><p>But Liam's not the only one fighting monsters that night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	notes on the many different kinds of monsters, and the knights who fight them off

**Author's Note:**

> so i should 100% only be writing my big bang right now but i was doing a 5 sentence fic meme on tumblr to procrastinate and then devouredflash prompted "Mickey interacting with Liam" and it turns out it takes a whole lot more than 5 sentences to get out my feelings on _that_ subject, so here, have a crazy oneshot with bonus!Fiona from someone who just loves Mickey Milkovich more than is emotionally healthy.
> 
> also posted to my tumblr, [mickeymilk](http://mickeymilk.tumblr.com).

Mickey wakes up hungry in the middle of the night. It’s dark, and Ian’s snoring a little, lying spread eagle on his stomach, his arm heavy where it’s draped over Mickey’s back. Mickey debates whether he should risk waking him, but knows he won’t be able to go back to sleep until he gets some food, so he shifts out from under Ian’s arm carefully and pads down the stairs to the kitchen, careful to avoid the squeaky step. Ian only got in from work a couple of hours before, he needs the rest - especially since, knowing him lately, he’ll be up and out for a run by seven, regardless of when he came crashing in. But when Mickey gets down the stairs, he’s distracted before he even reaches the fridge.

Liam is curled up in the laundry basket by the kitchen table, rooting around like he’s trying to burrow down into the fabric, which would be funny if it weren’t for the tears staining his face. He must have had another nightmare; has been getting those a lot, since the whole coke thing, which Mickey shouldn’t know except for the fact that these days he kind of feels a part of the Gallagher family, which means getting tangled up in all their crazy shit.

Mickey glances to the fridge, thinking of the sandwich in there he’d been heading for, and then back at Liam, crying and alone in the middle of the night.

“Hey, kid,” he says, making his decision, approaching Liam slowly and scooping him up. “Come on, let’s get you back to bed.”

Liam, still shaking from his nightmare, goes clingy as a limpet once he’s perched on Mickey’s hip. Sniffling, he clenches his little fists in the collar of Mickey’s t shirt – or Ian’s t shirt, he should say, he rarely sleeps in his own anymore – and buries his wet face in Mickey’s neck.

“Monsters,” he mumbles, and Mickey’s hardly ever heard Liam speak, he seems content to sit back and watch the craziness around him most of the time, is actually really damn calm for a toddler. So when he speaks, it seems important, would seem important even if it weren’t for the fear that so obviously clouds his quiet voice.

Mickey doesn’t quite know what to do. He feels awkward, holding Liam – has never been around kids before, really, let alone comforted them, he doesn’t know how to go about it, is afraid he’ll just make things worse. People have said a lot of things about him, but never has anyone said that he was a particularly calming person. He’s not really qualified to make someone _less_ afraid.

But it’s not like he can just put Liam down or anything, and the kid protests when Mickey tries to head up the stairs with him, obviously scared of whatever he thinks is up there. Mickey wonders what his nightmares are about. If the monsters are under his bed, or something scarier, if there are, to him, monsters lurking inside the other people in his room. Mickey remembers being young and scared. Mickey remembers his whole fucking _life_ being scared. But he had a reason to be; there were monsters in his house that didn’t bother to hide, that took the shape plain of his father, his brothers, his family. Liam doesn’t have that. Liam has a good family, but he’s only three, so maybe he doesn’t know that yet.

So Mickey stays downstairs with him. He paces around the kitchen, because the walking seems to soothe Liam, until Liam’s stopped crying and is just snuffling gently into Mickey’s neck. Then he tries to head up the stairs again, but that sets off Liam crying and kicking, and Mickey has to walk around the kitchen for another ten minutes before the kid finally quiets down.

Mickey knows he could just think _fuck it_ , dump Liam back in the laundry basket, go wake up Fiona and tell her to deal with it, she’s the fucking surrogate mom here. But Liam is small and feels frail in Mickey’s arms, except his hands gripping at Mickey are so, so strong, and Mickey doesn’t have the fucking heart to leave him.

Mickey really knows being scared.

So he just keeps walking around the kitchen and the living room, bouncing Liam up and down a little, talking to him in a low, quiet voice. Mickey doesn’t know how to keep the monsters away but he knows what’s always made him feel better, so he tries that, he tells Liam stories and tries to distract him, tries to make the world feel a little bit safer. He tells Liam about a wonderful knight who’s tall and strong with hair like fire and lives secretly in the Gallagher house, fights off any monsters that might be out there with his fists and his words and a carefully concealed butterfly knife which he keeps in his boots. Mickey tries not to think about how fucking sappy it is that as soon as he thinks _hero_ , he starts talking about Ian, but Liam isn’t old enough to understand the veiled descriptions, and it seems to calm him down a little. Ian can have that effect. Even in his current addled state, which scares Mickey more every day, he’s still _Ian_ , he’s still a solace in a world fucked beyond repair.

“Monsters,” Liam mutters again when Mickey stops talking, but it sounds a little less scared, maybe even like a question this time. Mickey sighs.

“Yeah, kid,” he says. “I know there are. But don’t worry, that knight is gonna fuck them up for you. He’s real good at keeping them away, I promise.”

He pauses for a moment, runs a hand over Liam’s fuzzy hair, takes a deep breath.

“And it’s not just him, y’know,” he carries on in a low voice, still pacing around the room. “He’s got a friend. A real badass. Not a knight, but a real good fighter anyway, so if the knight ever goes away again you still don’t have to worry. ‘Cus his friend used to be afraid of monsters, too, so he knows how to fight them better than anyone.”

Liam’s hands loosen their grip on Mickey’s shirt. Mickey looks down, and sees that his little eyes have fluttered shut, his head slumped into the curve of Mickey’s neck. He’s asleep.

Afraid that if he stops moving the kid’ll wake up, Mickey keeps pacing, and it’s a few minutes of that before he even notices Fiona sat on the stairs.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he mutters, jumping a little when she comes out of the shadows but making sure to keep his voice low. “You almost gave me a heart attack, bitch.”

Fiona just raises an eyebrow. She’s wearing just her underwear and a long sleeved shirt, some odd socks, and her hair is greasy and messy, there are dark rings under her eyes. Mickey remembers life when he’d just got out of Juvie. He was never feeling great then, either.

“What’re you doing?” she asks, nodding towards him and Liam. She seems almost suspicious, but in a soft, tired kind of way.

“He had a nightmare or some shit,” he tells her. Doesn’t know what else to say. “How long were you sitting there?”

“Not too long,” she says, but the look in her eyes says different. “Wouldn’t have pegged you as the storytelling type.”

“Yeah, well,” he replies, awkward, no idea what to say to that.

She crosses the kitchen and flicks the coffee pot on.

“Want a cup?” she asks, like that’s a normal thing to say at 3am to the criminal you barely know who’s holding your baby brother.

“Um, I should probably get back to bed or some shit,” he says. “Now that you’re here, and all, you can take the kid.”

“Don’t want Ian to wake up alone?” she asks, a strange kind of smile in her voice, and _fuck_. Mickey knows, logically, that Ian’s siblings know about them - he sleeps in Ian’s fucking bed, they’re never apart, anyone would have to be stupid _not_ to realise, but still. It’s one of those things. Everyone knows - nobody _talks_ about it.

So he just kind of shrugs, in a way that could be a yes or a no depending on what you wanted to see. Then walks the few steps towards her and starts to pass Liam over, but as soon as he’s jostled Liam wakes up, starts crying again, his hands clenching back in Mickey’s shirt, and he won’t let go to be put back in Fiona’s arms. Mickey feels awkward, all of a sudden, almost guilty when he sees the disappointment in Fiona’s eyes. But she shrugs it off, so he does too, resting his palm on Liam’s back and bouncing him gently, trying to soothe him back to quiet.

“Looks like you’re stuck down here,” Fiona says, with an attempt at a smile.

“Yeah,” he replies. “Okay, I’ll have some coffee.”

He keeps walking Liam around while she makes it, and when his cries have quieted again, when it seems like he’s falling back asleep, he goes and sits down at the table. Fiona follows, places a chipped old handmade mug in front of him.

“Milk?” she asks, pouring some into her own cup and offering him the carton, but he shakes his head, _no_ , he likes it black. She folds herself into a chair opposite him, one leg drawn up, hunched in on herself. She’s taller than Mickey, but in that moment, she seems so, so small.

“Is he okay?” she asks, and it takes him a moment to realise she’s talking about Liam. She’s staring, not at Mickey but at the little kid in his arms, and her gaze is soft and hurt. 

“Yeah,” he says, automatically. “I mean - well, I think. He doesn’t wanna go upstairs, though.”

She nods, and they sit in silence for a moment, her cradling her mug, him rubbing Liam’s back awkwardly, trying to judge whether the kid’s falling asleep yet. She takes a sip of her coffee. Her nails are painted, a bright sunny yellow, but it’s chipped around the edges, and her cuticles are bitten down. 

“And Ian?” she asks, her voice quieter, a little scared, like she doesn’t really want the answer. “Is he… he’s okay, right?”

Mickey pauses. Thinks. Thinks of the Ian he knows, thinks of that fact that he loves every Ian, every possible version of that stupid perfect asshole, but of the fact that the Ian he _knows_ seems to appear for shorter and shorter moments these days, replaced with someone lost, someone who seems scared, someone who seems so utterly out of control of their own actions that they don’t know what to do. He thinks of Ian dancing and Ian taking drugs and Ian getting in fights where pure rage takes over his face, Ian laughing at things that aren’t funny in a way that’s even more scary than his anger.

“No,” says Mickey, because it’s obvious, really. “I don’t think he’s okay. And I don’t have a fucking clue how to help him.”

Fiona’s expression doesn’t change. She knew that, then, had wanted him to lie, to tell her things were all okay.

“Yeah,” she says, quietly, and buries her head back in her coffee mug. Mickey sighs, frees one hand from his hold on Liam to take his own mug, too, lose himself in the dark bitter taste for a moment.

When he puts his mug back down, Fiona’s staring into her drink with damp eyes, and he wonders what monsters she’s seeing, if she can figure out a way to fight them alone, like she’s so used to doing. He sees her hand on the table. It’s trembling. 

Slowly, he lays his on top of it, squeezes gently.

Mickey knows what it’s like to be scared.


End file.
